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Authorising FreeAgent to send emails from your address

How to add a custom email domain so that FreeAgent can send emails from your address.

How to add a custom email domain.

FreeAgent can send emails to your clients from verified email addresses. By default the ‘From’ address for these emails is automatically set to ‘noreply@remailer.freeagentcentral.com’. However, if you own the domain from which you send your business emails (e.g. accounts@mycompany.com), you can set up a custom email domain in your FreeAgent account. This authorises FreeAgent to send emails on your behalf and display your address in the ‘From’ field. This article explains how to add a custom email domain.

NB: If you do not own the domain from which you send your business emails (i.e. if you’re using a Yahoo, Gmail or other common domain), you will not own the DNS settings for your email account and will not be able to authorise FreeAgent to send invoice emails from this account on your behalf. This means that if you use a Yahoo, Gmail or other common domain for your business emails, the invoice and estimate invoices you send from FreeAgent will always be sent from ‘noreply@remailer.freeagentcentral.com’.

1 Choose a verified email domain

Choose ‘Sending emails’ from the ‘Settings’ area of your FreeAgent account and select the Custom Email Domains tab. The first time you do this, you will be presented with a message about custom email domains; please read this carefully and select ‘Add a custom email domain’ when you are ready to continue.

In the ‘domain’ drop-down menu, you will see a list of domains from all the verified email addresses that are associated with your FreeAgent account.

If you want to use a domain that you can’t see in this list, you will first need to add an email address on that domain and verify it. You can follow the link displayed beneath the drop-down menu to do this and there are detailed instructions about the process in the verified sender email article. (Please note that verified email addresses from Yahoo, Gmail and other common email domains will not appear in the list as FreeAgent is unable to send emails from these types of account on your behalf).

Choose the appropriate domain from the drop-down list and then select ‘Next step’.

2 Update your DNS settings.

The next stage in the process is to update your records with your DNS provider, using the information displayed on the ‘step 2’ screen.

Exact instructions on how to apply DNS records vary between providers:

The information that you will need to copy over when you update your DNS records is displayed in the two ‘value’ fields in step 2 of the ‘add a new custom email domain’ process.

‘Value’ field 1: SPF record

If your domain already has an SPF record (e.g. v=spf1 include:_spf.bobsmith.com ~all) you will need to enter a space after it and then add "include:_spf.freeagent.com". (e.g. v=spf1 include:_spf.medianode.com include:_spf.freeagent.com ~all)

If your domain does not already have an SPF record, you should add the DNS entry displayed in the first ‘Value’ field (v=spf1 include:_spf.freeagent.com ~all) to it.

Please note that you should only have one SPF record. You can validate your SPF record is correct using an SPF record testing tool.

‘Value’ field 2: verification key record

You will also need to update your verification key record. To do this, add the entry displayed in the second ‘Value’ field to your DNS records. This will be “freeagent-domain-verification=” followed by a unique set of letters and numbers (your verification key).

Once you have updated these records in your DNS provider, switch back to FreeAgent and select ‘Add [your domain name] as a custom domain’.

FreeAgent will then check to see if your DNS settings have been updated. If they haven’t, you’ll see an error message and you won’t be able to add your email domain as a custom domain until your settings have been updated. Please note that changes to DNS settings may not take effect immediately so if you see an error message within 48 hours of updating your DNS settings, you should check back again in a few hours. If you still see error messages after 48 hours, you should contact your DNS provider for further guidance.

If your DNS settings have been updated and set up correctly, you will see a message confirming this and your email domain will be added as a custom domain. This means that the estimate and invoice emails you send from FreeAgent will be sent from your email address. Please note that if you change your DNS settings in future to remove the spf record, verification key record or to enable DMARC for your own domain then you may find that your FreeAgent emails are not successfully delivered to your clients.